Businesses and organizations provide information about their products and services via the Internet to make the information available to potential customers and members. One way that businesses and organizations provide information via the Internet is through advertising. Some web pages contain display advertising that includes static or animated images, audio and/or video components. The display advertisements may be displayed together with other content of the web page, which could be news content, sports content, entertainment content, etc.
Businesses and organizations attempt to direct their advertisements to viewers of the advertisements who might be interested in the content of the advertisements (i.e., interested in the products or services of a business or organization) so as to increase the likelihood that a person viewing the advertisement will become a customer or member of the business or organization. To direct advertisements to viewers who might be interested in the advertisement content, the business or organization first guesses at what type of people might be interested in the advertisement content, then guesses at which people might match the identified type, and then guesses at the best way to reach those people. The guesses made by the business or organization may be educated guesses based on information collected about actual or potential customers or members, such as by surveying or monitoring actual or potential customers and analyzing the results of the surveying/monitoring.
In particular, to identify the type of people who might be interested in the advertising content, the business or organization guesses at demographic characteristics of people who might be interested, such as characteristics related to age, gender, hobbies, geographic location, etc. To identify what people might match the identified type of people and the best way to reach them, the business organization guesses at particular web pages that the type of people might frequent and advertises via those web pages, trusting that some of the viewers of the web pages might be interested in the advertising content. Alternatively, after identifying the demographic characteristics, the business or organization may rely on behavioral tracking of people as they use the Internet to determine whether a particular person's activity indicates that he/she is one of the type of people identified as possibly interested in the advertising content.
Behavioral tracking can identify personal information about an individual, such as the individual's age, gender, geographic location, websites previously visited, or previous purchases. Such personal information can be obtained by tracking the individual's online activities, including web searches that the individual conducted, the web pages visited by the individual, and the content viewed by the individual. Several technologies have been developed that enable tracking an individual's behavior online, including loading small identifying pieces of code into the individual's browser, inspecting packets communicated by the individual's computer, or by accessing membership information from third-party sites.